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11 Norham Gardens Oxford - introduction
There was a perceived need for accommodation for Catholic women: the Society of the Holy Child Jesus had run a large hostel (St Frideswide’s at Cherwell Edge) since 1908, but since the expansion in the numbers of women attending the university as a consequence of the 1920 reforms which allowed them to take degrees (rather than just follow courses of lectures), the Cherwell Edge provision could not meet the demand. Moreover, now that women could take degrees, the Society of the Sacred Heart had reviewed an earlier choice to omit Oxford from its list of universities where those of its sisters who needed degrees in order to prepare for teaching careers in senior schools and teacher training colleges could study. To comply with the rules of cloister that pertained before the late 1960s it was essential that these sisters lived in one of their own convents. The house was approved in January 1932 as a lodging for 12 students (half of these were Sisters, half were laywomen) and 6 live-in staff (all of whom were Sisters).
11 Norham Gardens had housed Henry Balfour, the first curator of the Pitt Rivers museum of ethnology and anthropology (left), and, for a longer period, the first professor of Eqyptology at Oxford, Francis Llewellyn Griffith (right), whose finds form the backbone of the Egyptian collections at the Ashmolean museum in Oxford. Griffith has also left his mark on the house – the section that contains what is currently the Magnolia Room and, above it, the Prayer Room, was built by him in 1913 during adaptations that turned the current student study from a library into a billiard room. Most of the Victorian part of the house has been left undisturbed however, though the uses to which the rooms were put have changed. For example the large refectory area in the basement was once Griffith’s museum, and the room that is currently the student TV lounge near the entrance of the house was until at least the 1960’s used as the dining room – first for the families who lived here, and then for the students. The ‘Library’ to the right of the entrance hall was the family living room – shelving was erected in 1931 when the Society moved in. |
January 2012 marks the 80th anniversary of the opening of 11 Norham Gardens as a House of Studies and Student Hostel run by the Society of the Sacred Heart. The community moved into the large Victorian gothic property from a smaller house in the Woodstock Rd which it had outgrown. The purpose of the project was to provide accommodation for women students registered at the Society for Home Students (now St Anne’s College) at Oxford University. Some of these were laywomen, but others were RSCJ. The need for such a hostel was generated by arrangements at the SHS which at that time was an association of students living in hostels or in other rented accommodation around town.
The house had a long association with the University: originally built as part of a financial
speculation on the part of St John’s College who owned much of the land now known as ‘North Oxford’, the houses in Norham Manor catered for the expanding families of academics as well as for professionals such as solicitors and bankers.
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